Plutonium pits are the triggers that are at the heart of modern thermonuclear
weapons. The U.S. lost the capability to produce plutonium
pits for its nuclear weapons stockpile in 1989 after a raid by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation investigating alleged environmental
crimes at the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado. At that
time, the Rocky Flats Plant was the stockpile plutonium pit production
facility for the American nuclear weapons complex. Although
the US Department of Energy (DOE) repeatedly tried to restart pit
production at Rocky Flats, it never succeeded in doing so.

In 1996, DOE officially decided to relocate plutonium pit production
to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), some 40 kilometers
northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico. However, that decision
was effectively made years in advance. In 1993, LANL prepare
an internal "strategic plan" that set out to grab whatever
portions that it could of national nuclear weapons programs that
it knew would inevitably be consolidated within a shrinking American
nuclear weapons complex. LANL not only sought to gain the stockpile
plutonium pit production mission, but to also obtain various related
missions that would enable it to produce complete nuclear weapons.
The lab was largely successful in doing so.

Not coincidentally, in 1993 DOE officially decided to relocate
beryllium manufacturing operations to LANL, which had also been
performed at the Rocky Flats Plant. DOE had previously declared
that beryllium manufacturing had to be located at the future plutonium
pit production facility. [Beryllium is used in plutonium pit
liners, tampers, reflectors, and neutron generators for nuclear
weapons.] Together, the relocation of these two missions represents
a return to the lab's historic "roots." LANL had
produced plutonium pits before Rocky Flats was built in the mid-1950's,
both for weapons that were deployed to the stockpile and for the
design and testing of new weapons.

Now that the plutonium pit production mission has been relocated
to LANL, DOE and the laboratory are planning on huge investments
in the lab's plutonium pit manufacturing infrastructure (please
see the DOE graph on the reverse side of this page). This includes
over half a billion dollars in construction over the next decade
for upgraded or new facilities that are directly involved in plutonium
pit production. All of this is to sustain a relatively modest
production rate of up to 50 pits a year. But as if that were
not enough, DOE is also making contingency plans for future production
rates of up to 500 a year, most likely to be located at the Savannah
River Site in South Carolina (to cost an estimated $3 billion).
For the sake of emphasis, these are just projected construction
costs, not total program costs (which are typically triple that
of construction costs).

One must ask what is the purpose of these proposed massive investments
in American plutonium pit production in light of the end of the
Cold War and the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty's obligation to disarm.
The painfully obvious answer is that the US simply has no intention
to disarm. Through its Stockpile Life Extension Programs,
DOE is seeking to preserve American nuclear weapons literally "forever."
Moreover, there are increasing indications that the US is
working on new designs for nuclear weapons (particularly low-yield
weapons) or significant modifications to existing weapons (such
as the already deployed adaptation of a gravity bomb into an earth-penetrating
weapon that may target Russian command and control centers).
It is most likely for these combined reasons that the US is investing
so much money into its resumed plutonium pit manufacturing operations.